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A Host of Newbery Honors
Aug. 13th, 2023 07:41 amI decided that I want to wrap up the Newbery Honor books of the 1940s before I leave Indianapolis, and in pursuit of this possibly deranged quest, I’ve been rocketing through books.
According to Wikipedia, Catherine Besterman’s The Quaint and Curious Quest of Johnny Longfoot is a retelling of a Polish folktale. It’s also a return of the Alice in Wonderland absurdism which always makes me crow with delight when I find it in a Newbery book, which is rather puzzling, because outside of Alice in Wonderland itself, this is almost never a literary mode I enjoy.
The Quaint and Curious Quest of Johnny Longfoot concerns Johnny Longfoot, son of a shoemaker, who goes to visit his incredibly miserly uncle, who insists that Johnny has to pay for touching his turf, breathing his air, etc. As Johnny is broke, he sets out on a quest to the King of Cats, who sends him to an island full of treasure to fetch a pair of seven-league boots and resize them to fit a cat. Johnny’s uncle, convinced that Johnny will cheat him, comes along for the ride, then fills the boat with treasure and sails off, leaving everyone else behind… only to realize that he forgot to bring any fresh water aboard, and his treasure will not save his life! So he gives up being a miser and starts giving everything away.
As with most absurdist books I felt fairly meh about this, but I do love the fact that the Newbery committee picked it. Before 1960, one of the Newbery award criteria appears to have been “will children enjoy this book?” which seems to have dropped out about the time that the awards committee got addicted to dead dogs, greatly to the detriment of the award.
However, some of the other 1960s changes were all to the good: the award became much more sensitive about racial issues later on. In the 1940s, by contrast, Mary Jane Carr’s Young Mac of Fort Vancouver features a mixed-race hero (half-Scottish and half-Cree) whose main conflict is deciding whether to be an Indian or a white man. This is kind of a stand-in for making a career choice (is he going to be a voyageur, or go to school to become a doctor?), but is always expressed in racial terms.
Also a medicine man spends most of the book trying to kill Young Mac, before deciding to try to recruit him as a new medicine man, and by recruit I definitely mean “hold him captive after Young Mac is injured falling off a horse.” But then the medicine man dies conveniently of fever, which has been cutting a swathe through the local tribe because of the medicine man’s ineffective cures, so… poetic justice, I guess?
Eva Roe Gaggin’s Down Ryton Water also has some issues on this front, but mostly it’s the story of how the Pilgrims emigrated from Scrooby (down the Ryton, hence the title) to Holland to America. I found this a bit of a slog, to be honest; one of those books that just never took off for me, though I’m not sure why. It’s not that I disliked any of the characters, but I also didn’t care about them deeply, and found it weirdly difficult to keep track of who was who.
Finally, I read Holling C. Holling’s Seabird, which I was dreading because I found Holling’s later Minn of the Mississippi an endless slog. But Seabird is a breeze! A whirlwind tour through a century of changing transportation technology: a whaling ship, a clipper, a steamboat, and a plane, all seen through the eyes of four generations of a family and a scrimshaw seabird carved by the patriarch when he was a cabin boy on the whaling vessel.
According to Wikipedia, Catherine Besterman’s The Quaint and Curious Quest of Johnny Longfoot is a retelling of a Polish folktale. It’s also a return of the Alice in Wonderland absurdism which always makes me crow with delight when I find it in a Newbery book, which is rather puzzling, because outside of Alice in Wonderland itself, this is almost never a literary mode I enjoy.
The Quaint and Curious Quest of Johnny Longfoot concerns Johnny Longfoot, son of a shoemaker, who goes to visit his incredibly miserly uncle, who insists that Johnny has to pay for touching his turf, breathing his air, etc. As Johnny is broke, he sets out on a quest to the King of Cats, who sends him to an island full of treasure to fetch a pair of seven-league boots and resize them to fit a cat. Johnny’s uncle, convinced that Johnny will cheat him, comes along for the ride, then fills the boat with treasure and sails off, leaving everyone else behind… only to realize that he forgot to bring any fresh water aboard, and his treasure will not save his life! So he gives up being a miser and starts giving everything away.
As with most absurdist books I felt fairly meh about this, but I do love the fact that the Newbery committee picked it. Before 1960, one of the Newbery award criteria appears to have been “will children enjoy this book?” which seems to have dropped out about the time that the awards committee got addicted to dead dogs, greatly to the detriment of the award.
However, some of the other 1960s changes were all to the good: the award became much more sensitive about racial issues later on. In the 1940s, by contrast, Mary Jane Carr’s Young Mac of Fort Vancouver features a mixed-race hero (half-Scottish and half-Cree) whose main conflict is deciding whether to be an Indian or a white man. This is kind of a stand-in for making a career choice (is he going to be a voyageur, or go to school to become a doctor?), but is always expressed in racial terms.
Also a medicine man spends most of the book trying to kill Young Mac, before deciding to try to recruit him as a new medicine man, and by recruit I definitely mean “hold him captive after Young Mac is injured falling off a horse.” But then the medicine man dies conveniently of fever, which has been cutting a swathe through the local tribe because of the medicine man’s ineffective cures, so… poetic justice, I guess?
Eva Roe Gaggin’s Down Ryton Water also has some issues on this front, but mostly it’s the story of how the Pilgrims emigrated from Scrooby (down the Ryton, hence the title) to Holland to America. I found this a bit of a slog, to be honest; one of those books that just never took off for me, though I’m not sure why. It’s not that I disliked any of the characters, but I also didn’t care about them deeply, and found it weirdly difficult to keep track of who was who.
Finally, I read Holling C. Holling’s Seabird, which I was dreading because I found Holling’s later Minn of the Mississippi an endless slog. But Seabird is a breeze! A whirlwind tour through a century of changing transportation technology: a whaling ship, a clipper, a steamboat, and a plane, all seen through the eyes of four generations of a family and a scrimshaw seabird carved by the patriarch when he was a cabin boy on the whaling vessel.
